Pages

Monday, August 27, 2012

Copyright or Copy Wrong?

Over a hundred years ago, when newspapers existed
exclusively on paper and the fastest way news traveled was by tapping telegraph
keys and not computer keys, newspaper editors established a practice called the
“exchange.”As I understand it, Newspaper
A would send copies of its back issues to Newspapers B, C, and D, and they
would exchange copies of theirs with A and with each other.Items that were of more than local
interest but not time-sensitive would be picked up by other papers and printed
with the credit given to “(Exchange).”Such items could include what we would now call “feature” stories,
human-interest reports, and even poetry.

Why this bit of historical newspaper arcana?Because you need to know it to
understand the following poem, which I transcribe from memory:

I shot a poem into the
air

It was reprinted
everywhere

From Bangor to the
Rocky Range,

And always credited to
(Exchange).

In other words, once the woebegone poet got his poem into
one paper, editors at other papers saw it in the exchanges and liked it so much
that they printed it too, but somehow or other his name got left off in the
process. If poetry is the
clear expression of mixed emotions, this poet had plenty of raw material to go
on:pleasure at the thought that
lots of papers reprinted his poem, but regret that nobody but the local readers
of the first paper to print it knew who the author was.

Technology has not eliminated this kind of thing, but it
happens a lot faster now.In fact,
just since last week, it has happened to me twice, although I didn’t have the
misfortune to see my work appear without my byline.Here’s what happened.

Some people at a commercial website, which will remain
nameless herein, but which caters to a technical and engineering readership,
apparently read ny blog post last week about the submarine theater flipping
over.I’m not too surprised that
such folks glance at my blog. Google statistics tell me there are about fifty or so people
who get it regularly, and many more occasional visitors.Anyway, when they read last week’s post,
they thought it was good enough to run in not just one, but two websites they
operate.So all of a sudden I
appeared in their pages as an “editorial” writer, complete with photo and bio
attached to the blog post.But
there was no mention of the fact that it was actually reprinted from another
source.The impression their
readers came away with was that I had written it exclusively for them.

They must have a lot larger readership than this blog does,
because I later got an email from Bob Phillips, the producer of the Aquarena
Springs documentary from which I took the submarine-theater story.Now, to be fair, I didn’t tell him that
I was blogging about it, though I did write him a fan letter.He not only thanked me for the letter,
but said that he’d gotten 124 hits from the commercial website that had carried
my post, and sold three videos as a result.

My presence on someone else’s website was news to me, and I
promptly went over to the site and sure enough, there was my “editorial.”A few days later the head of the
publicity department at Texas State University emailed me to say he’d enjoyed
the story too, which is how I found out about the second place they’d posted
it.

Like the poet, I came away from this episode with mixed
feelings.I was flattered that the
outfit thought enough of the story to post it on two of their websites.But I was a little annoyed at their
failing to mention my blog’s URL, and to give the impression I’d written the
piece for their website.

This same sort of thing went on before digital technology
made it so easy to cut and paste whole articles in less than a minute.I have a curious old book with the
title “Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Processes, and Trade Secrets,”
which is an encyclopedia of how to make everything from adhesives to
yeast.It credits almost no
sources at all.Internal evidence
indicates it was culled from numerous old encyclopedias, trade journals, and
European publications too old or far away to be likely to sue for copyright
infringement.But it took years to
put that sort of thing together, and nowadays you can do it practically
overnight.

So has digital technology made copyright infringement and
its less serious but ethically questionable allied practices easier?Certainly it’s easier and faster to
electronically cut and paste an article today than it was in the old days, when
you had to retype it by hand (two or three times in the old Linotype days), set
it up, print it, ship it, and read it to do the whole thing over again.But the ethics of the thing haven’t
changed, as far as I’m concerned.

How was what I did with Bob Phillips’s video different from
what the nameless website did with my article?I did not present his video in its full and original form
and leave you with the impression that he had made it solely so that I could
show it on my website.Instead, I
added my own views, research, and recollections to material from his video and
came up with an original work of my own.And I stated my sources in the “Sources” section of the blog.Far from being annoyed at what I did,
Mr. Phillips was delighted, not least because the additional advertising
brought him more business.But the
nameless website passed off my article as though I had written it for them and
didn’t mind appearing in their pages to help them make money.

My intention is to maintain this blog as a strenuously
non-commercial enterprise, and I plan to keep it that way.Because I have another job that pays
the bills, I wish to keep this blog free from even the hint of a conflict of
interest by accepting no sponsorships or advertising of any kind.You see no ads here, I invite no guest
bloggers to advertise their wares, and the only reason Mr. Phillips’s video
sales website got mentioned was because its URL is the only way I could refer
to it in a way that is publicly accessible.When the commercial website passed off my blog as their
“editorial,” they gave the impression that I was working for them, which is
assuredly not the case.Which is
why I was somewhat annoyed as well as pleased.

As for that poet, I hope I do not get into trouble with the
literary heirs and assigns of Franklin P. Adams, a popular humor columnist of
the 1930s.He was the guy who
wrote the poem.Considering the
subject of this column, it would hardly be fair to Mr. Adams to leave his name
out.

Sources:Although I won’t give their URLs
here, you can find the websites where my post was reproduced by typing in last
week’s headline to Google.By now,
the piece has even made its way to the Theater Safety Blog on
Blogspot.com.And Franklin P.
Adams’ poem “Frequently” appears in An
Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor edited by Bennett Cerf (Doubleday,
1954), which in turn reprinted it from his anthology The Melancholy Lute(Viking,
1936). There now.

An Apology (added Aug. 28): After I posted the above blog, I received an email from a staff member at www.pddnet.com, the "nameless" site I referred to. He said I had given him permission to copy my blog over a year ago, and otherwise he wouldn't have posted it without permission, which is what I thought had happened. I had completely forgotten about this exchange, so I extend my apologies for raking pddnet.com over the coals undeservedly. They have agreed to list my blog URL in any future posts, and so I consider this commitment sufficient amends for something I told them they could do in the first place.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Ethical and Otherwise

Ethical and Otherwise:Engineering In the Headlines is a collection of over 40 of the most popular blog posts selected from nearly ten years of Karl Stephan’s engineering ethics blog.Bridge collapses, airplane crashes, train wrecks, explosions—the most widely read blog posts are all here, from the truth about why the Titanic sank to the latest recall scandal.This ebook is available in both Kindle and iBook formats.

Analog and Mixed-Signal Electronics

Textbook from Wiley

A practical guide to analog and mixed-signal electronics.Covers elementary analog circuits, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog circuits, high-frequency circuit design, and power electronics.Recommended for EE undergraduates, advanced students, and for those involved in computer engineering, biomedical engineering, computer science, and physics.Publisher:Wiley (2015). See this book on Amazon.